Building brands and community + influencer marketing that actually works with Dee Murthy | E1740

0:00Bud Light has never been a politically charged brand. and their core consumer is just it's the run-of-the-mill guy that watching the nfl that is their core consumer it's bros right like i want to have a bud light when i'm at at a football game that's you know beginning and end of it yeah that's it and and and i appreciate their attempt to go younger but like it doesn't make sense you're an alcohol brand you know if you went to a 30 year old consumer it's not like they're anti anything they just don't participate in that conversation. And they just honestly, all they care about is football and racing and basketball playoffs.

0:39It's a very simple minded consumer. And so I thought it was like, inappropriate for Bud Light from a marketing strategy to do anything outside of the fairway. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Embroker's Startup Insurance Program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. save up to 20 % off of traditional insurance today at imbroker.com slash twist while you're there get an extra 10 % off using offer code twist quick node gives blockchain developers unparalleled reliability and speed with access to unlimited endpoints across 18 chains and 35 networks Get one month free by using code TWIST at go.quicknode.com slash TWIST.

1:26And OpenPhone brings your team's business calls, texts, and contacts into one delightful app that works anywhere. Get 20 % off your first six months at openphone.com slash TWIST. All right, everybody, got a real treat for you today. hey, I don't know, last year, somebody texted me or DM'd me on the Twitter and said, hey, this is a podcast. They were just talking about you and they stole the format of All In. And I said, okay, let me go check that out. And I checked it out and I found this amazingly fun podcast called Group Chat. That's been around for two or three years longer than All In. So quite the opposite.

2:09It seems like we may have inadvertently stolen your format. And one of the three hosts of that is Demurthy. He's also an entrepreneur, and I thought I would have him on the pod. Welcome to This Week in Startups D. Thank you for having me. It was so nice when you guys launched All In because it was like peak COVID. We were coming to the office to record the podcast, and it just felt like this amazing time for content. Not an amazing time for the world, but you guys came at such an important time, I think, in people's lives. It is interesting. And you guys talk about your show a lot on the show because podcasting builds community.

2:52Just like I had this experience as an author, and I tell people who are becoming authors and writing books, books are basically communities. And you got to kind of build a community around your book and meet them, and then they bring other people into the community. And podcasting is very similar. Now, you've got a company called Ghost, backed by my friends over at Union Square Ventures. and you've been in, I believe, clothing, marketing, or creating clothes, right? For a long time. Yeah, a long time. I've been in fashion for 20 years, building and operating probably a dozen brands. All right.

3:29So I heard at some point you say, we're spending all this money on marketing, and we're just dumping buckets on Facebook, Instagram, whatever. And I'm not getting famous, and nobody knows who I am. I should just do a goddamn podcast put some money into that and then see if I can build like a community around that and so maybe you can just tell the origin story of group chat and how your business thinking behind it and then did that actually happen or did other things also happen? Yeah, really interesting story so in 2016 for my business 5-4 we were about to do a transaction with a private equity firm and we were at the finish line 11th hour term sheet was came life-changing money for me and my business partner and so we're doing 75 million dollars in business finally been grinding it out since we were in college finally this is our moment 11th hour term sheet gets pulled it's long enough it was carlisle yeah so i'll tell you who it was yeah they pulled the term sheet And at that point, obviously, everyone else in the market now smells blood.

4:42Why did the term sheet get pulled? And there was no real rationale around it. And so we ended up not doing the fundraise and just going back and focusing on our business. And what I realized at that moment is that I had no clout. I have zero clout as a founder. And it was that moment when I was around the tech scene in LA, San Francisco, New York, And I would see like how people looked at Travis from Uber or how they looked at Emily from Glossier or Katrina from Stitch Fix. And I was like, those founders have clout. Like people view them differently than they view me. And so I was like, I have to change this because if I was a founder with clout, maybe that term sheet wouldn't have been pulled.

5:27They wouldn't have f***ed with me. Yeah. And so I was like, how do I change that? And so I need to have a voice. I need to have an opinion. Like even when we pitched our business, we were bootstrapped$75 million business and no one knew who we were. Crazy. They didn't know our business. We were always private. We just ran our business and, you know, minded our own kind of way of life. And we didn't do press. We didn't do anything. And so I realized like it actually does matter how you communicate your business to the outside world because it does create an energy around your business. like and I'm sure you've seen in investing and things like that like where people want to be around you with you when you're doing well and you have like a story to tell so I started going on this journey of like how do I become famous and and and and I didn't mean it in the sense of like the rock I didn't mean the sense but you know I wanted to be known in my community and to the people in my industry and so I started thinking to myself I had an assistant at that time we were like, let's go post pictures on Instagram with all my famous friends.

6:30No one cared about that. It didn't resonate with people. I'm like, we should start a daily vlog. And I'm like, no one cares about a married guy with two kids. That's not going to work. And then my partner in Young and Reckless, which is a streetwear brand we started a long time ago, had started a podcast. And he was like, we should do a podcast together talking about basically, he would walk into my office. He's from Ohio, came from Akron, Ohio at age 21, became a reality TV star on MTV called Fantasy Factory. And he was like, I ask you about all these things all day. What are interest rates? What is investing?

7:05What is this? Let's just talk about it. So we started doing this podcast and it took about a year till we realized anyone even paid attention. Because the first episode, I think 35 people downloaded. The second one, I think 27. So we lost 20 % of our listenership on the first week. But I think the fascinating part of it was that one day, I was promoting something about one of our brands and it was one of our most successful days ever. And I realized, oh my God, there's actually a community here and people actually care what we have to say because it actually translated into the business. And so that was our journey of the podcast kind of story.

7:47And as you know, the power of the community when they're engaged, like podcast is the most intimate form of media, in my opinion. It's like your alone time in your ear, your relationship with the audience is so crazy. And it's like, we've seen it firsthand. And now in my new business, Ghost, so many of my suppliers and buyers that are on the marketplace are listeners of the podcast. Right. And investors I meet, they're like, oh, we listened to the pod. We want to take a look at your next round. And it's so fascinating. And full circle, it's happening, right? Like what I thought I could do six, seven years ago, it's now coming into fruition.

8:25Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I think you hit on the key factor, which is podcasting. It takes a long time. You got to do it for a couple of years to get good at it, to build an audience, to figure out a format that actually works. and you figure it out a good format like a news roundtable situation and that works and people who are actually friends with each other which is part of the secret of all in so there's some like camaraderie people like that as well um but it's so intimate because it's in your ears i have like my my little ear monitors in right now like a newscaster you have your airpods in or whatever or you actually are old school man you got the you got the wired ones in there uh i'm a boomer uh no i think you're like millennial slash gen act right yeah i'm 42 so i'm on the i'm i'm on the on the i'm on the class on the bubble you're on the bubble who do you align with more um sometimes music wise i'm gen z okay um so you like drake and the other nonsense I love nonsense rap music.

9:31Got it. Okay. I'm a Coachella guy. And then I would say now that I have kids, I feel more Gen X on a lot of issues. Yeah. Like your back hurts, your knees hurt, you're tired all the time. Yeah. Even just like, I never cared about crime. Now I do. Right. I never cared about homelessness. Now I do. Because it affects my daily life. When you have to protect those kids, yeah, it becomes acute. You're like, I can handle myself. okay I can handle myself and my partner and then all of a sudden you got two kids or three kids and you're like okay I gotta defend three or four people it becomes almost like instinctual but it's really interesting like how the fans feel because you're in their ears maybe they're listening to the pod before they go to bed they have a dream about weird comments all the time people had a dream about you last night I'm like were you listening to the pod when you fell asleep they're like yeah I'm like I think those two things are related in any way they're like I never thought of that Or they go for a run or whatever, their workout.

10:31So you're just with them all the time and they hear your voice. And I don't know if you've had this experience yet, but you order your Starbucks and then somebody turns around and they're like, D? Yeah. Group chat? J-Cow? Yeah. I mean, it's... I mean, especially like, you know, your guys is... You have such a large audience. Like your voices are in our heads all day. Yeah. So it's like, if you heard it in the wild, you're like, oh my God. It's like, oh, I know that voice. I know that. It's like Tom Broca of this era. You know what I mean? It feels like that. Correct. Yeah. And also it's habitual.

11:08That's the thing other people don't realize is once you put that into your, you subscribe to it and you get the next issue, this was the power of RSS, really simple syndication. Shout out Dave Weiner. Man, it's just the fact that it, oh, there's another one. Okay. Yeah. Maybe I'll have another one. Sure. You know, it's like the bartender bringing you a refill to your drink without you asking for it. It's like, oh, it's there. I might as well have a sip. Listen, we work with super early stage companies at my investment firm launch. You know, pre-series A, maybe you got a couple of thousand dollars a month in revenue.

11:43You've raised a couple of hundred thousand dollars, maybe a million dollars, right? It's the early days, year one or two of a startup. And I'll be honest, a lot of times startups, they don't have their insurance. They haven't set that up yet. haven't set up their accounting properly. They're getting things cleaned up. In fact, I was recently had a great startup, but they didn't have D &O insurance that basically protects your directors and officers. That's the D directors, people on the board, officers, the people who work at the company, right? Directors and officers insurance is super important.

12:13So what do we do? We send them right to in broker our friends over in broker are a business insurance company that's built specifically for startups. You just fill out a simple application, right? And then startups get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes, four quotes, four lines of coverage, 15 minutes, easy, breezy, lemon, squeezy. That's right. They connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy. And listen, you might think, oh, it's too early to have insurance. It's not that expensive. It's not that complicated, because in broker makes it easy.

12:45So here's what I want you to do. Try broker today with the code twist and you'll get 10 % off their startup package at in broker.com twist. That's in broker.com twist. We love in broker. I use in broker. They're an amazing team. They do a great job for startups, whether you're in year one or year five, go use in broker.com twist. So how has it affected business? I don't think you have advertising on it. I don't remember hearing ads, but you have something called a Chatty Cathy Club, which I think is a Discord, which I think people pay for, but you kind of don't explain it on the show, which I think is interesting.

13:27Yeah. And you also don't talk about your own business on the show, so you don't talk your book too often. So I didn't know about Ghost. I knew about the other stuff you were doing because when somebody sent it to me, I just clicked the links in the show description. But someone's like, yeah, no, Fred Wilson or somebody, your friend backed them. And I was like, oh, really? What's that? So what's the philosophy of the format and making money from it or not? How do you look at it? Yeah, I think on the format, it's meant to be as a casual conversation amongst friends about the things that I feel like people should know in their daily conversations.

14:06The one caveat that we've changed is we've removed politics from our discussions. Oh. It became very polarizing with our audience where my DMs were like either, it's like visceral reaction either way on so many topics during the last election that we felt like we aren't political experts. Like you guys are much more knowledgeable about politics than we are. We're very familiar with local politics, but like national politics, I would say we're not experts and definitely not policy experts, which just offend people when you don't have the perspective around it. So we kept politics out of it. And then what's happened is, is our downloads are great for a podcast with a very culty community.

14:50If you were to go out to like the top 10 podcasts, we don't have the downloads of those, millions of downloads an episode. And so what we found is our advertisers are our listeners. And so there are people in our ecosystem that want to reach other listeners of the podcast. And so that has been our best way to monetize it. So the folks at Ledger had a year-long sponsorship with us. And there's been a number of other businesses and brands, like Car Trackers, which is a way to sell your car. These have been incredible partners of ours that help support the cost and pay all the people that work on the show.

15:29Monetizing it for us, probably similar to you guys, it's not our core business. so we're kind of we're not too sure how we want to go about it because we're not going to be active on social media promoting other brands and promoting other businesses so we've taken that approach but we do want to give back to our community so we did create basically we don't want to call it an NFT but it is a technically an NFT it's called the Chatty Cathy Club where we've charged$250 it's an access to the community and what we're rolling out are a series of events of what I believe would be a cooler, more fun version of a networking event.

16:06Similar to what you guys did with All In Summit. We are hosting a series of events over the next couple of years where we bring our community together. We have changed so many lives. We've made people quit their job, go learn how to code, double their pay. We've gotten people fundraising. We've made business partners. People have started dating. People have gotten married. There's so many different stories. I'm sure you guys have heard of yours. you've made such a big impact on people's lives and it feels really really good to do that and so yeah we want to crystallize that and so this is our way of like doing it in a more in a more like kind of organized fashion so we created the club we created some merch around it and we just want like it it's nice when i wear our hat and like people just walk up to me at the laker game or the Dodger game.

16:58They're like, Oh, what's up chat or at the airport or something like that. It's just a way of crystallizing the community. And I think that's how we feel about monetizing it. I think if I didn't have another, this full-time business, I would, I would go all in on it. Cause I think it is so powerful if you can control, like there's, you know, I always joke, like you look at how much Rush Limbaugh used to make. It's crazy. Terrestrial radio. Like this is a more powerful medium. people yeah don't realize how big those syndicated radio shows got now the numbers are a little funky uh but you know over uh you know it's in the 10 million range uh in terms of like their reach was 10 20 million howard stern at the peak rush limbaugh and i i think some of those like crazy folks still exist on like terrestrial radio but i i think it's only boomers who listen to it and then i saw today howard stern trending on twitter and i grew up a huge howard stern fan i'm like huge i wonder what's going on why you know did he get canceled again or what and and it was like oh the nba players don't recognize me at the knicks games and they come over and they talk to tracy morgan and chris rocker sitting on either side of me and they don't say hi to me and i was like that's what happens when you go behind a paywall like if it was joe rogan or you know so i mean uh i go to nba games and i know a couple of players because they listen to the pod and they're into venture and investing and like you go behind a paywall you secure the bag and i think he went down to probably a million listeners from like 20 or 30 million so you just think about cultural relevance you get hundreds of millions of dollars from a small group of people one or two million paying a hundred dollars a year two hundred dollars a year for their serious xm and then you don't get recognized uh at the nba games uh which is yeah pretty crazy tell me about ghost What is Ghost?

18:52What is the premise of this business? And congrats on getting Fred Wilson. I wonder if your experience on the podcast was one of the reasons they invested. Yeah, it's really interesting. So during COVID, we saw this enormous amount of supply chain disruptions. Everyone was talking about it. Everyone was aware with it. Goods were coming in late. And in apparel, when you receive jackets in the summer, you're basically shit out of luck. There's nothing you can do. You have to hold them for a whole another year. And so what we started kind of struggling with is the piling up of inventory during COVID that we just could not liquidate.

19:31And what I found was I've been in the industry for a very long time, know all the characters, whether it be retailers, middlemen, brokers, small brick and mortar retailers. And I found it very, very painful to actually liquidate the product. And so started doing a bunch of homework on the space and realized there's been basically no innovation or investment at the end of the product lifecycle when it comes to venture particularly. And just to put into context, most people in America shop at the end of the product lifecycle at discount retail. Really? Oh, actually, that does make sense. TJ Maxx.

20:10Yes. TJ Maxx is a$60 billion a year business. Burlington Coat Factory,$10 billion business. These are massive, massive retailers. Where America Shops, 99 Cent Store, Dollar General. This is all liquidation inventory that ends up there. Even Sam's Club, Costco, all of these people buy this product. And so we were like, there's no focus or connectivity from those brands to those retailers. These retailers are scouring the world for inventory. tapping on the phone and fax machines and email yeah literally fax still and and and like messy spreadsheets and like weird shady characters saying they have 200 000 lipsticks of revlon in new jersey you gotta maybe it's real maybe it's not could have fallen off a truck and tony certain person's name might be soprano yeah exactly who is a lot a lot of a lot of that going on and inventory is all over the world like the best brands have inventory stuck in switzerland Amsterdam, China, Australia.

21:09So we were like, how do you build the pipes to connect all of these sellers and buyers? And so what Ghost is a private B2B marketplace, it's private because the best brands in the world do not want to let anyone know how much excess inventory. If you look at the Nike stock six months ago, they came out and said that their inventory position ballooned to$9 billion, 20 % drop in the stock overnight. yeah and so it is so sensitive to the publicly traded companies and so what we wanted to do is build a platform where the seller controls who has access to the inventory so the seller when they list a lot they can select a brick and mortar versus online retailer only japanese retailers if that's all they want to liquidate in got it so the power is all in the seller and then the buyer has the ability to make offers and and then we have tools like financing and logistics that help facilitate so it's this huge you know market that basically has been forgotten by technology yeah and so it was a way you know being an insider we kind of knew what product that we had to build to make it easy for both sides so um we ended up uh raising our seed round uh in november of 21 with equal ventures and eniac okay and then um peak market got a good valuation i got a good valuation there and then i raised april of last year which was pretty tough yeah brutal market but sideways valuation perhaps yeah yeah we actually we we got we actually got a pretty good markup because a lot of tailwinds in the business and union square ventures came to the tables a woman named rebecca caden who sits on our board just absolutely been transformative for us and what's funny is is we're you know we're in that process again right now so it's interesting how climate, you know, evolves with what's happening in the macro world.

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23:47Listen, everybody, this is the AWS or Azure of Web3. If you are building dApps, decentralized apps, you need to use QuickNode. It's that simple. Find out why companies like Twitter, Adobe, Coinbase and OpenSea use QuickNode. Get one month free by using the code twist at go.quicknode.com slash twist. That's go.quicknode.com slash twist. And remember to use the code twist. As a founder, you have to focus on your customers. But getting investors, if you're a money losing business and you're investing in the business to grow it, you do have to understand the cycles and valuation. And despite me as a former entrepreneur or an entrepreneurial investor, I guess is how I describe myself and a journalist previously, I try to explain this to folks.

24:39I know you can get the sick valuation. You raise 10 million on 50 million posts and you don't have a product in market yet and there's like some first time fund that wants their crypto you know blockchain investment but we you know have fun for two years but make this money last there'll be pressure for you to spend it I would make sure you hit some revenue milestones here so that you can backfill reality because there will come a time when the public market comps will be brought up when it comes to your evaluation and oh yeah now it's happening it's happening Oh, yeah, definitely. And it's funny is that, you know, what's funny is, is just seeing the climate from, you know, what you hear from folks is venture has always been the most optimistic form of capital, right?

25:21They're looking, they're, they're believers in the future. They want it to work. They're looking for every reason to say yes. Whereas today venture is looking for every reason to say no. So I'm sure that's just an overcorrection from the last couple of years. it is um probably the new entrance into venture of which i am one you know i started investing right after the 2008 cycle um which was incredible like to start after the great financial crisis would be like starting investing this year which by the way would be a great time i'm like raising my fourth fund right now watch one four and um it's like amazing because i'm deploying capital in companies that are incredibly focused capital efficient and who have expectations of valuations that are incredibly reasonable and they know they have to hit milestones in order to get the next funding round, not put on a great show and do some sizzle and some tap dancing and then be like, ta-da!

26:16People are like, okay, can I see a spreadsheet? What's your percentage growth? And it's just, this is the best time to be an investor or a founder. As I tell everybody, fortunes remain in the down market. They're collected in the up market. I agree. I mean, I'm so excited about being a founder right now because it also like the best businesses are rising to the top too. Yes. If you have execution, you have a real business and you have a real team, you are getting deals done. And maybe it's not at the price you want, but you're still getting deals done and you get to go build your business, which is a privilege in itself.

26:52I always tell founders, like, if you can send a chart, like send, this is your email to a VC. Dear Fred Wilson, big fan of your blog. I love this blog post. We have figured something out in this marketplace of discounted goods that are off-season. And yeah, we're growing 37 % quarter over quarter. And here's a chart. Would love to catch up with you sometime. I'm going to be in New York next week. I'm available anytime for a 15-minute coffee. And I give people this little script. And they're like, that'll never work. I'm like, humor me. Send 10 emails. So I got nine responses. I'm like, send the 10th one another response and say, didn't hear back from you.

27:32Would love to catch up. like i got all 10 and you know how i did that i had met bezos jeff bezos at an event uh at a dinner and i told him what we're doing at weblogs inc and he said if you're ever in seattle come by and we had in gadget joystick these couple of blogs and i told my partner brian alvey i was like we're going to seattle next week uh be prepared uh i'm going to get us a meeting with jeff bezos so i emailed jeff bezos and i said jeff great to meet you we're launching our second and third blog and we just got samsung uh to sponsor the video game blog for you know six months and they're paying us in advance i'm going to be in seattle next week would love to meet you and your team for 20 minutes and uh he responded his assistant responded immediately wow i lied we had no hotel we had no tickets i wasn't in seattle next week and i was like if i can meet jeff and he just on the spot offered to put in uh 500k wow crazy wow and then that's insane story but i mean if you give them the green light hey i happen to be in town i'll meet anytime and then you give them i could show you what we're building next for 20 minutes it's like you're being respectful of their time etc um and uh you see that's a lost art that's a lost art jason like a lot of the younger people i think they feel like they're owed the time not really earned yeah i i think they're just like i there's a humility of like what i i remember like early internet everyone's email was on their website sure you could email anybody and and i would email people and be like can i um get five minutes of your time it'd be so grateful i'm a student at usc and people would respond i literally take five minutes i'd send them a thank you card and you know they were very respectful today it's like people like yo let's meet i was like for what no i get those emails and i'm like is this like i just assume it's phishing or spam and i didn't realize it's culturally uh it's cultural stupidity i mean no it is people are just dumb and yeah self-awareness is not is not a big uh trait these days i would say guess what like reality is here now and like you you you better have a chart you better have an mvp you better have a squad you know two co-founders people email like i want to talk about my ideas i'm like uh yeah great talk to your pals like ideas like i've got 300 emails from people who have you know two years of revenue who want to meet like i gotta get through those first yeah if i get to the point at which like the mvps and maybe i guess i could get to the idea group um you seem to understand marketing really well and I think your content marketing is really cool.

30:19And then you also, did you do the Run Club or was one of your other co-hosts? No, I do it. So explain this because this also seemed like you just natively understand something about community or people. I guess you're like an ENTJ on the Myers-Briggs if I had to guess. Do you know, did you ever take that? The Myers-Briggs? I think in college. I don't remember. It's for scopes for men. Yeah, exactly. How you can think about it. Yeah, high school, college. You're definitely highly extroverted. So tell us about the run club thing you did. And did that have any impact on the business? Oh my God. The run club is the most amazing thing I've ever done.

30:54So five years ago, we were starting a running brand in our core business, 5.4, and wanted a way to market the brand. And one of the guys I worked with was like, Hey, I know you run all the time. Would you ever do a run club? I was like, I would love to do a run club. I don't have the bandwidth to like promote it, but like, I would do it. And so he's like, great. He's like, just post it on your Instagram, tell people to come run. So Saturdays, we used to meet in West Hollywood and every Saturday we'd come meet, no agenda except to run. And, you know, pre-pandemic, we were getting a hundred plus people to run up Sunset Boulevard every Saturday morning.

31:35Wow. And it was the most amazing founders, investors, actors, just college kids. It was just like this insane community. So many friendships were formed. Businesses were started. And then unfortunately, the pandemic ended up killing the momentum of it. And then a lot of people moved and people got older and kids and whatever. But then when everything kind of normalized, maybe end of last year, I was like, I'm still showing up to the spot every Saturday on Santa Monica and Doheny. Anyone wants to come, please come. Nice. People started coming again. Amazing. And what I realized and how it really picked up was I would on the podcast say, I'm in New York City.

32:20I don't have time to meet everyone for drinks. Who wants to go for a run Thursday at 6 p.m.? And 50 people showed up. Then I'd be in Paris. Hey, it's freezing cold snow. Anyone want to meet? five people showed up Miami Denver Texas Tennessee wherever I was that was my way to like because the problem is is I do think like inherently everything generally evolves around alcohol yes tragedy I very much enjoy drinking tequila and it's a big part of my life but like I don't want always want to be forced to go have a drink if you're an entrepreneur uh and you make that like another focus of your life, you're going to get beat by your competitors who are not doing shots on a Tuesday.

33:06I mean, yeah, exactly. So I was like a productivity killer. Exactly. So I would be like, how do I meet all these people and give them all some time and build this community? So we started this run club and it still goes. I mean, I push a stroller with my two-year-old in it, my six-year-old is biking. It's like a family thing now. And it's the power of meeting people in person is just irreplaceable. I agree. And I think that community building is so important to me. And I'm so diehard LA, West Hollywood, that when I walk down the street on sunset, I know everybody. And it's something I pride myself on.